Head, Heart, Skin
by Flit-Flibbertigibbet
Summary: "Every Thinker remembered their first Thought. Hard not to remember the first time you see your soul printed forever on your body...They were a fact of life, each individual's facts of life sprawling over their skin." AU, John/Sherlock


**More Johnlock, yay! I want to send a thousand thank-yous to my goddess of a beta, riseuplikeangels, and to jimhasafrownyface and madasacatfish for letting me bounce some ideas off them! (don't own anything, etc)**

Every Thinker remembered their first Thought. Hard not to remember the first time you see your soul printed forever on your body. Many times they were vague, simple, confusing to all but their owner. While they often appeared on visible, potentially embarrassing places, they were usually faint and small enough not to draw excessive notice. Even when noticed, it was common practice not to comment on them. They were a fact of life, each individual's facts of life sprawling over their skin.

John Watson's first Thought was his most obscure, an outlier in his following pattern of direct Thoughts. Flowing across his shoulder blades, the scar simply read _words mean more_. His father would subsequently joke that it was a fitting first Thought, while behind him Harry grimly smiled a thank you. John missed her thank yous these days. Even though he knew how common it was to be a Thinker, even though it would be far more unique to be a Mute, John couldn't help but feel special as he traced the faint ridges across his shoulders. He'd have those scars for the rest of his life, they would shape and mark and describe him forever. He had finally become a man, with his own truth.

Now, wrapped around his wrist like bracelets, he had _let me help,_ and _I miss Harry._ He counted himself lucky to not have Thoughts anywhere more visible. As much as he liked the liberating feeling of Thinking, he didn't want them open for the rest of the world, Thinkers and Mutes alike, to see.

Mutes; as a Doctor he should really begin to address the minority of non-Thinkers with the correct term. But somehow, calling them Cognitive-Quiet seemed callous to John. It didn't capture the loneliness in not having your truths covering you, in not being evident in your own soul, in never feeling the bone-deep certainty that accompanied a Thought. It didn't capture the lack of connection he saw in the Army, as his pledged brothers had each other's names and promises over their skin, and others were an empty canvas. It didn't capture the lack of identity as Mutes were given extra dog tags, marking them as silent. It didn't cover the field doctors that would work to save the Thinkers first, pulled in by the obvious humanity on their skin. While some Thinkers believed that Mutes had lesser emotional tendencies, were easily corrupted, or weak, John knew that every man was the same beneath their skin. He'd seen enough bodies to know.

The Mute minority always seemed to be the withdrawn, quiet, the antisocial. Sometimes they were defensive, rude, sometimes terrified of people, sometimes they were the mentally imbalanced, but always they seemed lonely. John couldn't discriminate between Mute and Thinker patients, which lead to his having far more Mute patients than other doctors in his practice.

His view on Mutes grew further from the rest of the world's on the day he met Sherlock Holmes.

"I play the violin when I'm thinking, and sometimes I don't talk for days on end, also I'm a Mute, does that bother you? Potential flatmates should know the worst about each other."  
His sly, mysterious knowledge and lightning-fast monologuing left John stumbling after, and after having his life story set before him, John Watson was left gaping at a doorway with nothing but a name and an address.

"The police don't consult amateurs, and they're one of the most Thinker-exclusive workforces in the country!"  
"If your haircut and posture weren't enough for me, the Thought on the palm of your left hand proves you a military man. _Duty. _Very straightforward. That, coupled with your tan and your limp, plus the Thought along your left thumb, faint as it is, adds up to active duty. Tan-sunny setting, most likely a desert by the lines around your eyes, and the Thought under your thumb nail about the_ damn sand_. Afghanistan or Iraq are the most likely desert places for a British soldier to be on active duty. So, a soldier in active duty in a desert-that of Afghanistan or Iraq. How did I know about your brother and his drinking problem?Your phone. It's expensive, but you're searching for a flatmate, you wouldn't spend money on gadgets. It's a gift, then. The engraving on the back, _To Harry, with love, _rather telling. It was a gift of sentiment. Who would give you an expensive phone, obviously wanting you to stay in touch, but not offer you a place to stay? Sounds like your Harry is a troubled one. The Thoughts around your wrist also mention Harry. He could be a friend, maybe even an old lover, but those Thoughts would show some signs of fading. No, this is someone you're attached to permanently. Brother, then. Brother with a drinking problem, by your Thoughts and the scratches on the phone." He could have been angry, as he always was, by someone assuming they knew him from his Thoughts. But this man, this _Mute _had described him accurately with more than just words on his skin. He'd taken John's Thoughts and looked beyond them, and put together a life story with a phone.  
"Fantastic."

"Look at the Thought around her mouth, can't you see it? It's her newest, had to be about a minute before her death! _I'm afraid._"  
"Of course she was afraid, she was dying!" A heavy snort.  
"Yes, thank you for your input, Anderson. As usual, your blindingly quick mind has trumped me. _Look, _Lestrade. It's around her mouth. Why? Over ninety percent of Thoughts before death are on the hands-they want to help themselves, defend themselves, so why is hers around her _mouth?_"  
"Autopsies show it was poison, Sherlock. Taking poison is often quite frightening." A pregnant pause.  
"_Brilliant, _Lestrade!"  
"Thank you-really?"  
"Yes! _Taking poison. _It's forced. That's why her Thought is around her lips! Look for the suitcase, Lestrade." The edge of a coat, whirling away.  
***

As John held his cane, with an overweight Italian in front of him, and glimpsed a proud smile stretching across the stoic face of Sherlock Holmes, he felt a new Thought sear up his shinbone. The swooping jolt, followed with a solid click of a new fact of life, settled in his abdomen and he smiled and thanked Angelo. Only later, in the privacy of his room, did he read the words etched there, blazoned atop the faded _useless _he'd earned in the hospital.

_Alive._

It was the first time since Afghanistan that John had been thankful to be alive.

***  
The glass of the window is rippled, and when Sherlock stands John can see the cabbie, sitting at the table as Sherlock considers the pill between his fingers. He can see the lack of Thoughts and he almost laughs at the irony of two insanely clever Mutes locked in a room with drugs, then winces at the implications of Sherlock and anything resembling a drug. And John stares across an alley as a man he barely knows prepares to kill himself, and his mind conjures thousands of plans; leap across the alley, smashing windows in a superhuman flight, throwing books, stones, breaking windows and focus, turning and leaving and letting the madman decide his own fate and never sleeping again. And before he's finished shouting down option three his gun is in his hands and he's firing and shaking and Thinking, and his trigger finger has one more name etched in it, _cabbie, _and John doesn't even feel guilty that he won't know the man's name.

After they'd giggled at the crime scene and faced an arch-enemy armed with an umbrella, after they had grabbed Chinese and escaped back to their flat, John peered at Sherlock's mouth, trying to see if Sherlock Holmes had been afraid.

"You won't see anything, John." Startled, John looked into his eyes guiltily.  
"I know, I'm sorry, I just was curious."  
"It's fine. But I promise, you won't ever see anything."  
John stopped looking.

John stopped looking, but he couldn't stop Thinking. It was as if he was making up for Sherlock's lack of Thought, his skin beginning to clutter with words.  
As he stood in a dark museum and heard shots, and left a girl to die, words coiled on his heel.  
_He matters more. _  
As he parroted the words of a madman, wrapped in Semtex and fighting the urge to run to Sherlock, to wipe the broken look off his face, words burned over his tongue.  
_I would be silent to save you. _

As he handed over a useless, empty phone, words slithered over his hip.

_Know when you are beaten. _

He huddled in a cage, words fluttering on his abdomen.

_We are hunted. _

Each Thought turned John into a walking shrine, the Thoughts of John Watson, burning for Sherlock Holmes. It was sick at the same time it was liberating, John waiting for Sherlock to see, to notice, to comment, but Sherlock never glancing. How far can a man go into worship without notice? How long could John be the soul of two men at once? John would have loved to discover.

***  
But then came the fall. Then came the phone call, the lies, the unprecedented tears. Then came the searing pain of Thought across his heart, a vibrant, ropy _Sherlock _just under the sprawling mess of a bullet wound intermingled with _please God let me live_s. The deepest Thought of John's life, the messiest and the biggest, the last. What other Thought could John have, if not summed up in Sherlock?  
And then came the emptiness, the fading and strengthening of old Thoughts, the lack of new ones. The slow but constant deepening of Sherlock's name over his heart, like poison, like shrapnel, like morphine. The dimming on his shin, no longer _alive, _he was _useless. _

The routine, the mornings, patients, fitful sleep. The mornings, patients, fitful sleep. The concerned visits of Lestrade, of Molly, the chatter of Mrs. Hudson. The mornings, patients, fitful sleep. The violin collecting dust on the mantle. The tiny corner of wallpaper curling off the wall, coated in yellow spray paint, torn by a bullet. The mornings, patients, fitful sleep. The skull grinning at him from the mantle, closer to Sherlock than John would be again. The waiting, begging for a Thought, for something to be real again, for something beyond the writing over his heart, always burning, never fading. The knowledge that no new Thought would come for him, because a world without Sherlock Holmes is one without truth, and John couldn't trust the normalnormal_normal _of his everyday, couldn't assimilate it into truth.

The mornings, always a dull grey before hit by the sun, always with one cup of tea and toast, with a claustrophobic ride on the tube to work.

The patients, washed out under fluorescent light, meaningless with their countless colds, endless without the distraction of an exhilarating, perturbing text.

The fitful sleep, tinged with panic before it started, varying in its depravity, sometimes unsettling, with disappearing scarves and endless corridors and searching for something you can't find, sometimes unbearable, with fixed, staring eyes and milk-white skin and wine-red blood and _so beautiful _and _so terrible _and _so much _and John wakes up gasping and shuddering, lips clamped and fingers tracing the name over his heart.

The mornings, patients, fitful sleep.

The man silhouetted against his window.

The stranger silhouetted against his window.

The ghost silhouetted against his window.

The friend.

The liar.

The martyr.

Sherlock silhouetted against his window.

***  
John doesn't remember what he said. He knows that his throat is raw and aching, and he has fingernails etched into his palms, eight crescents spelling out _Sherlock, _he knows his knees are bruised from collapsing onto them and his eyes itching and swollen and he has no shame left to give, he has nothing left to give, because what more could he muster? What more can a man give after three years of a single Thought, after three years of damned routine?  
"John." The deep voice still fills him with fear, with elation, with frustration.  
"Yeah, Sherlock?" John answers, because it's his job. He is the conductor to Sherlock's light, he will stay and he will listen. He will give all he has and give more and give more until all of John Watson, all of his Thoughts and his soul are in the graceful hands of Sherlock Holmes. He waits, staring at his hands, for Sherlock.  
"Thank you." And Sherlock is kneeling, face upturned to him, broken and vulnerable and _less _than John thought possible. And Sherlock is turning over John's wrists, and there are Thoughts John didn't know were there, scratched without his knowledge or permission, mirrored on each wrist.  
_I believe in Sherlock Holmes. _And John is staring, wondering when and why and how, but not truly surprised, because what greater truth could there be?  
And when John looks up from his hands, into the changing jade of Sherlock's eyes, Sherlock's lips quiver, remembering to smile after three long years. Sherlock's fingers twist, undoing each button of his shirt like he's losing someone, like he's losing John. Sherlock's skin shines pale in the light, the protruding collar bone, the visible, pounding heartbeat, the-  
The vivid, roiling, snaking scars over Sherlock's heart, enormous, thick, impossible to hide.  
_John._  
"Sherlock, you didn't-why would you _do _this? Sherlock, this is _insane, _this is-" the words boil out, frantic in shock, that his best friend, his Sherlock, would defile his body to try to be _normal, _to try to be a Thinker-  
But Sherlock is laughing, minute huffs of air that only John sees as laughter, and he still holds John's hands.  
"_I _didn't do it. I just-had a Thought."  
Only silence could greet that. Only silence could greet a human Sherlock Holmes.

John doesn't understand until later. Until the three years of lies and heartbreak and fury have compressed into bruised lips and clutching hands on his hips that burn, until Sherlock has traced his every Thought with his fingers and with his tongue, until they climax together, furious, cathartic, until Sherlock goes pink when John cleans them off, until John grabs Sherlock's wrist to keep him there. John doesn't understand until he wakes up with Sherlock Holmes.  
His cheek rests on Sherlock's chest, he can feel the tail ends of his Thought pressing against his ear. The light from Sherlock's window slants onto his face, blinding, so he ducks his head a little closer to Sherlock, sees the light go slanting over Sherlock's shoulder. The white of Sherlock's shoulder, cast in perfect detail, captivates him. He could count every hair, every freckle...  
He could see each miniscule ridge on his skin. John peers closer, trying to get a better look, and when he blinks next it's like his world is rearranged in perfect focus, he sees the faint, curling, elegant writing of Sherlock Holmes, and he sees the Thought-covered skin, and even if he had a lifetime to map out the words of Sherlock's skin, he wouldn't, because it is far more beautiful to see the layered map, and he feels his own tiny Thought whirl under his eye, an invisible _of course. _Because of course Sherlock Holmes, the greatest mind the world has ever known, is the greatest Thinker.  
"I told you you'd never see anything. I didn't say it wasn't there." John would jump if he wasn't so absorbed in Sherlock, in the feel of skin and the words running over it.  
"You promised."  
"I tend to break those."

Now, when John watches Sherlock pull on a shirt, he sees a faint Thought on a rib, _bored, _and he bites down a chuckle. Now, when Sherlock steals his laptop and his face lights up blue from the screen, John glimpses _I am right, _around his lips.  
"I was quite happy with the secrecy, you know. It was something novel, a Mute Thinker." Sherlock's felt John looking.  
"As if you didn't have enough made-up titles." He could be irritated, but he's not. Nobody else would give Sherlock a title until John, until he became Flatmate, Friend, Fantastic, Amazing, Machine, Human. He can understand the need for titles, for labels, for justifications of a strange being.  
"You ruined it."  
"Your titles?"  
"No, my Mute Thoughts."  
"How? Nobody can see them but me."  
"Because you're so _visible, _John!" And he's tracing the raised outline of his Thought, unconsciously grasping at his shirt. "My Thoughts were all truths, valuable, tiny, making one picture nobody could see. And then, I have your name scrawled over my heart like I carved it in with a knife, John! It's _obvious." _And it should hurt, hearing Sherlock fighting against John's name across his skin, but the fear under Sherlock's disdain is so clear to John, it might as well be written over his skin.  
"Sherlock, you're a Thinker. Sometimes there's a Thought that's bigger, and deeper, and it ends up being visible. For everyone else, it's considered _normal."_  
"Normal is boring, John."  
"Perhaps, but you certainly aren't. Having your first big Thought at thirty-four? I'd say it's close to unprecedented."  
"It _hurt, _John. No other Thought has, it's always been a rush of certainty, of truth, followed by a new Thought. But I hit the ground and it was like being ripped open. It-" And Sherlock stops, clicks his jaw shut, tries to find the right words.  
"It was like there wasn't another Thought left?" And Sherlock nods. So John nods, and slips his laptop off Sherlock's lap, and ignores the irritated huff. John settles next to him, next to his impossible flatmate, impossible lover, and brushes shoulders. And it's the first time in years that they're sat, without a case or a motive, or an argument, with nothing but off-beat breathing and shared acceptance. And John is afraid, afraid that Sherlock will run again, will leave again, will reject him as a tie to normal. And it makes him want to fight, to grab Sherlock and hold him down and _make him stay, _but what is the point in Sherlock staying if he isn't Sherlock? And Sherlock is afraid, afraid of the pain his own mind inflicted on him, of the possibility of a life without John, without a doctor to heal him or a friend to tease him or a lover to hold him or a blogger to make him immortal. Sherlock would run, but John is a soldier, and fear is better than nothing, better than routines and mornings and patients, and he would rather spend life chasing after a madman than watching his Thoughts fade, and so they both stay. They both stay on a threadbare, dusty couch with the taste of fear in the air. And John takes Sherlock's hand, and they watch both of their thumbs gain words. The _shoot him_s and _save them_s and _duty_s of John's thumb, and the _closer look_s and _correct_s and _idiot_s of Sherlock's are overwritten with _safe _and _love _and _stay, _and they grin at each other.  
Because when have John Watson and Sherlock Holmes ever given in to fear?

**Thank you so much for reading! My tumblr is assortednerdgasms, I'm left-handed, and it's a Thursday! Much love!**


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